Dropbox is getting a makeover. Not just the ‘new haircut and a few stylish outfits’ type, either. This change is a bit more… functional. You’ll now be able to link with and work on Google Docs and Slack projects, in addition to a few other tools like Zoom video conference meetings, and Atlassian (Jira, Trello, etc.) based projects, without tabbing over to each of those web apps individually. The company has also teased an updated desktop app called ‘the new Dropbox’.
At an event in San Francisco, CEO Drew Houston announced that starting today, Dropbox will be a lot more integrated with other apps. Basically, it’ll resemble Google Drive even more, with its own ecosystem that includes your contacts, calendar, communication and tools in a dedicated app.
Partnering up
With new Slack integrations, Dropbox users will be able to send messages to team members, add web shortcut URLs in a project folder and view links and cloud documents in a single interface.
The new app will now also allow users to view Google Docs and Microsoft documents side by side, and edit both. Powerpoint documents can be edited inside a Google editor and all changes will be saved in Dropbox. You can also view AutoCAD files inside a Dropbox file viewer, even if you don’t have AutoCAD installed on your machine. That’s a handy little touch. There will be a unified search, so you can search, view and access any file across all of your different cloud storage spots from one interface.
This feels like the thing Dropbox was destined to be. Or, at least, the thing we always hoped it would become. We know the struggle of downloading copies of files from Drive to share with a colleague on Dropbox or vice versa. This is a brilliant evolution of a great cloud system — and that’s not a sentence that crops up in the Stuff offices lightly. The new Dropbox is attempting to simplify the constant software juggling problem we have. And apparently its developers will now work to incorporate even more apps and tools over time.
The app isn’t available to everyone yet, as it seems it’s only rolling out to early access users right now. Everyone should gain access to the new features in the coming weeks.
Source: Dropbox Blog via The Verge
